Bundesliga is undoubtedly one of Europe’s top divisions and has seen its team’s develop and get better over the years. A league very well known for its fast-paced football with lots of transitions as also seen new coaches and new styles of play come into some teams creating more tactical diversity and, therefore, making games more interesting and different. This change in the Bundesliga panorama had Pep Guardiola and his Bayern Munich side as one of the big propellors with the Catalan coach winning lots of silverware in his time in German football. Time has passed and managers like Julian Nagelsmann, Lucien Favre and Marco Rose are a few of the current mangers that try and innovate and play unique brands of football which is something that really contributes to football and for those who watch it.
In this data analysis we will take a look at tactical trends in the Bundesliga in the current season, an analysis of key metrics will allow us to identify main traits of styles of play within the various teams as well as make a comparison between them all. Furthermore, a tactical analysis of spaces commonly exploited, will allow us to see what type of football teams are attempting to play in the Bundesliga nowadays.
Data analysis
In this first section of this analysis we are going to take a look at the data, statistics for each team were gathered from Wyscout and are referent to matches played this season. We are going to take a look at various metrics that allow us to identify key aspects of the team’s style of play related to the various phases of the game. Our data pool are the 18 teams competing in the Bundesliga in the 2020/2021 season.
Build-up play
To start off our analysis we are going to take a look at the team’s approach in the build-up phase, we are going to determine wether they adopt a more positional approach or if the preference falls on counterattacking, if they prefer to play a more possession based game or if they try and get to finishing areas with the least touches possible and what style of passing is mostly used by each team. We will also take a look at the most used formations by each team this season and try and demonstrate the connection between that and the teams’s approaches to their build play in general.
Most used formations
First in our build-up play sections is an overall look at the teams’s most used formations, for this, we will use passing maps taken from Wyscout. The passing maps show us the teams’ average formation based on the players average positions on the pitch, at the same time, it highlights the most frequent passing lanes between players giving us a general notion of how teams attempt to build their play.
Looking at the maps we can start by identifying 4-2-3-1 as the most used formation so far with 8 teams preferring to set up in that manner, followed by 4-3-3 and 4-4-2 with 2 teams each. Two teams line up with five at the back (Union Berlin and Hoffenheim) but in different formations, 5-4-1 and 5-3-2. Lastly, we have one Koln who lines up in a 4-1-4-1 and two teams with a line of three in defence (Frankfurt and Werder Bremen) in both a 3-4-1-2 and 3-4-2-1 formations. The formations we see in the maps are based in the player’s average positions and they don’t reflect the changes that happen in teams tactics and formations in the different moments of the game but, in some cases, they reflect the most common moment for the teams quite well. For example, teams like Borussia Dortmund, Bayern Munich or Leipzig are teams that usually dominate games and possession of the ball, for that reason, they all play with a line so they can maintain the team compact to counter-press effectively. In the maps of those 3 teams we can clearly see the high lines when compared to others and the teams in general is more compact although so high up the pitch. Other teams that don’t spend that much time attacking and aren’t able to established themselves in the final third as well have much lower defensive lines and possibly teams who’s maps reflect more of the defensive moment of the game than the others. Al lot of this we’ll see, as a correspondence with the data and the metrics that we’ll be analysing will help to explain some of the characteristics of the maps that were mentioned.
Positional attack vs counter-attacking
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